


intestines

by tragakes (lejf)



Category: Berserk
Genre: Bottom Guts, M/M, despite its title it's not actually violent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-21
Updated: 2017-10-21
Packaged: 2019-01-21 01:50:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12446964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lejf/pseuds/tragakes
Summary: “There are apples in the cupboards. They might be the only other edible thing here. You can take one if you want.”“Apples are fine.” Even his socks were wet. They must’ve left a set of footprints across the room, a mark of Guts that would fade by dawn. He found one, decently firm under his hand. Then, rubbing it with his thumbs, he said, almost absently, looking into the darkness of the cupboard, “I’m leaving.”





	intestines

In retrospect, Guts would never be sure what spurred him to find Griffith before he shadowed down those cobbled streets and was gone. Maybe it was the knowledge that a meeting or explanation would’ve been demanded by Griffith. That Griffith would’ve found him and resisted before he left. 

No, now. He wasn’t unsure. He knew it all with inevitable certainty. Griffith _would_ have found him. He would’ve caught wind… and fought. Tooth, blood, and nail.

In retrospect, this certainty should have told him that he was aware of how deeply Griffith needed him. 

As it were, the night was subdued and miserable, throwing down rain and rain and only more rain, thundering against the stones as though it harboured some vendetta, and through it all there was the billow of a cloak that was so dark that it faded into the underbelly of some cloud, and was immediately lost in a spray of water under a heavy boot as Guts trudged past.

Two knocks, firm and with purpose. Impossible how Griffith could identify people by just their knocks, or maybe that was just what Griffith wanted people to think. Maybe he had some eyehole somewhere and looked first. It didn’t matter either way, inconsequential under the turn of the handle and Griffith standing there, behind the door, hair falling gentle around his face in a silken cradle, standing where the candle-light reached, licked by its reds and oranges and yellows and in some comfortable-looking nightwear that was mostly pale grey with a dash of red. Feet in slippers. He must have known Guts was the one knocking. Who else would he have opened the door to, like this?

Guts, the rain shouting in behind him, thunder quivering under his feet, water pouring from him, everything blue and black, a creature of blackness, sword-hilt glistening wet at his side. A puddle forming under his thick-soled boots. 

“You’re letting the rain in,” Griffith commented lightly, and stepped to the side to admit him.

“It lets itself.” Opposite the door a fireplace was crackling and eating and eating. He caught the glimpse of something not dry wood — paper shards, tumbling in the flame for a fleeting moment before they blackened into nothing. The fire was a ruse: not some hearth for Griffith, or any tired traveller to warm themselves up. It was an incinerator. The cradle of civilisation, also the crux of destruction. Griffith must’ve been burning confidential letters again. 

His boots came undone under his hands and he set them by the fire to dry, even though walking back would make them wet all over again. It was the principle of the action — to try, regardless of how futile. “What brings you here?” Griffith had seated himself at his desk and pulled up a chair beside him. Papers were splayed out like intestines in front of him, and there was a cup half-filled with tea that Griffith offered him. Guts resisted the urge to question it. People didn’t share cups and belongings so flippantly, but then again, that was what Griffith always did. He shared his dream like it was the rain pounding on the door, but didn’t share enough of himself; he didn’t share that roiling shadow of his. That was Guts. Guts _was_ his shadow, and wasn’t he bitter about it? He was a shadow reaching for the impossible — to reach off the surface onto which he’d been cast, and grasp Griffith’s hand. Griffith pulling up, Guts pulling down, locked into a precarious balance like that. 

The tea was cold. “It’s cold,” he said, passing it back to Griffith, who wrapped both his hands around it to ascertain just how lifeless it was, and whose fingers slid over Guts almost thoughtlessly. It was like a live wire to Guts. Griffith was a being whirling with energy, and touching him was either invigorating or fatal with the shock he gave.

“I hadn’t realised,” Griffith apologised, tipping his head forwards slightly, a strand of hair falling in front of his eyes. Guts slipped his hand away. “There are apples in the cupboards. They might be the only other edible thing here. You can take one if you want.”

“Apples are fine.” Even his socks were wet. They must’ve left a set of footprints across the room, a mark of Guts that would fade by dawn. He found one, decently firm under his hand. Then, rubbing it with his thumbs, he said, almost absently, looking into the darkness of the cupboard, “I’m leaving.”

He hadn’t realised that he’d had this _sense_ of Griffith in the room — Griffith’s pulse, the rise and fall of his chest — because all of a sudden he knew, without turning around, that Griffith had gone very still, and that there were thoughts rolling in turmoil beneath that polished veneer.

“When?” There was a calm quality to his voice that belied wavering control. 

Griffith was staring down at his papers, hands spread against the desk, plastering the documents down, unmoving. Guts crossed back over to him and placed a hand beside his. Side-by-side, his hand was larger, broader, not for things such as the pen.

“Aren’t you going to ask why?”

“I can surmise.”

“I have to leave,” Guts said, eyes fixed on some word over Griffith’s shoulder — some word in the distance where a castle was shining — and here he was, turning away from it, turning away from Griffith. “Now, tomorrow, ten years in the future… it has to happen, someday. I'm not sure when. I don’t want you not to expect it.”

Griffith looked as though he wanted to say no, and that Guts couldn't. Instead, what came out was, “Alright.”

Equally disturbed, unable to reach and peer into that head of Griffith’s, Guts bit into the apple and almost immediately spat it out. It had appeared sweet and red on the outside, but the inside was all rotten.

Griffith looked like a crooked man, his eyes staring deep into something — the future, maybe. “Do you think I’m cruel?” he asked. “Is it because I’m too cruel? Is that why you want to leave? You- the one person who has seen the entirety of me… is it because the entirety of me is too hideous to stand?”

Guts had this enormous sense, then, that any word he said could’ve changed the world, because it would’ve changed everything that Griffith thought, and Griffith held the world. It loomed over him, a shadow growing in the corner of the room: an answer. Any answer. While Griffith was still vulnerable and impressionable. 

The apple burned in the fire where Guts had tossed it. Blackening, slowly, and pieces of it turned grey and flaked off as ash. 

“Yes,” Guts said, and Griffith’s head snapped up and his eyes were wide and lips parted and his face was painted pale with shock — betrayal, it could’ve been — and Guts was moving from the fire towards him and placing a knee between Griffith’s legs to prop himself up, his hand against the desk so he was towering over Griffith, one leg on the floor, the other on the chair, “I think you’re cruel, not because there have to be sacrifices for your dream… they all know that! They _know_ death, they’ve _seen_ the battlefield, but they fight anyway. That's not your sin. I think you’re cruel because you’re like this.” His other hand rested heavy on Griffith’s shoulder, and for once Griffith was the one looking up and completely enraptured. “So pure and white but cruel inside. But I guess I savour it. It's stupid of me.”

Then Griffith’s hands were against his face and he was being pulled down, down, down, those palms like a brand, an afterimage of fire, and the gentlest and cruellest lips he’d ever known were against his. Griffith’s hair was spun silver in his hands. His face was carefully contoured, smooth, a perfect mask, but his mouth was honest against Guts’, desperately seeking, gasps lost in-between. 

“I savour it,” Guts said, and tasted his mouth, and then said, “because then that cruelty is all mine.”

“I never took you for a smooth talker.”

“You never took me at all.” His mouth was so wet and warm, and Guts had this instant’s image of everything he had missed. Sitting out in the rain with Griffith, watching the moon rise, two idiots against the world, the sun, a smile like light, laughter in the distance, a flag rippling as Griffith held it high. Guts raising an identical one somewhere else in the world. Letters. He rested his forehead against Griffith’s, their shared breathing laboured like they’d been fighting. “I’m leaving, I’m leaving, and I might never come back until I can stand next to you.”

“You _have_ me,” Griffith said, frustration laced in his tone, and Guts found something amusing in the fact that Griffith was at a loss. “What don’t you have?”

“I can’t even begin to count.” Deft fingers were unclasping his cloak and it fell to the ground around them in a pool of fabric, and then they were undoing each other’s buttons, letting their fingers run across each other’s skin. “The only thing I have is a sword, and until I become a master of it, I can’t face you. Not as an equal.”

His head was gently tilted upwards, from where he’d been watching swaths and swaths of skin be revealed as Griffith’s shirt fell away. “I loathe you,” Griffith said, very quietly. “There is a scale in my head. One is weighted with thousands of lives and all my years of living. You are on the other end.” Guts shifted his legs so that he was straddling Griffith, resting on his thighs, pressed almost chest-to-chest. “I’m finding it difficult to choose.”

“…Don’t, then,” he said, and kissed his words away, like a thief. Griffith’s hands spread across the breadth of his back, over the dips and curves of muscles, sliding down and down to where Guts had only been touched by anyone else once. “Come on. Come on, coward. Touch me.”

And Griffith did. He pressed a finger in and Guts was rocking back against his hand, forwards against Griffith, who he could feel hot and heavy pressed between them, and groans were hitching in his throat, and then there was another finger, and Griffith’s head was tucked into the crook of his neck and kissing and nibbling there and muttering some nonsense that was lost between breaths because the second finger _hurt_ , and he tried to arch away from it, then Griffith was shaking his head and saying something about upstairs, and there were stairs, and there was a bed softer than sin and Griffith was above him, oil on his fingers, pressing kisses of apology while Guts just locked his arms around his body and pulled him closer. 

Pushing against his entrance, two fingers, sparks of pleasure, a look on Griffith’s face that was unquestionably undivided adoration, and then Griffith was pushing in and Guts remembered throwing his head back and letting him and the headboard going _bang-bang-bang_ and sweat running down that perfect skin of Griffith’s, and every thrust that somehow locked their lives closer and closer together. It was nothing like before. It was a tidal wave that swept him up and then swept him under, Griffith kissing every inch of him, tugging his nipples, devouring his mouth, drowning.

And part-way through when Griffith’s mouth was open in pleasure and Guts felt open and raw and he saw Griffith in his entirety, he really _saw_ , and he knew: Griffith was a whirlpool, the gravity not of a dream, but of the conviction to follow it, a dream entirely external, to pull not one life nor two nor three nor a town nor a city nor a country but a _world_ of lives inside, so external that it required him to hollow out everything inside in sacrifice. He was a puppet on strings of fate he’d set in motion, but the puppet had deviated, drawn in by intestines, by guts that he needed to make his to be free — Guts, who pursued what was entirely internal and mastering himself and could at any moment shake off anything clinging to his shoulders and leave. Guts, with all his lines drawn in an outline of him, entirely self-contained. He was _himself_. The world, and everyone else, would always only be looking in. 

And that was what Griffith, a chameleon man that shifted to what people wanted to see, needed. With guts and intestines, he could cease to be a puppet of his dreams and become a man again.

_Chase me_.

When Guts woke up, it was day, and he left.

**Author's Note:**

> hideously unedited. Really want to write a long fic but I'm juggling one in SnK already


End file.
